Dr. Strangelove: The Mineshaft Gap

[ed. Can't let China beat us to potential extinction.]

All in the Family

Eric Trump-backed robot soldier startup can’t pay staff after founder borrowed $4.6 million from company to buy home.

Key Points

• Robot startup Foundation has failed to pay employees since missing its Oct. 30 payroll, angering some workers after its CEO borrowed $4.6 million from the firm last year to buy a luxury home, according to people familiar with the matter.

• CEO and co-founder Sankaet Pathak is Foundation’s sole board member, raising governance concerns among prospective investors.

• Foundation’s widely reported $24 million in Pentagon contracts actually stems from its 2024 acquisition of Boardwalk Robotics, which held some existing government research contracts, the people said.

• Pathak’s previous company, Synapse, collapsed in 2024, leaving thousands of customers without access to deposits. Pathak reportedly took loans from Synapse as it neared bankruptcy.

*****

Foundation Future Industries, a maker of military humanoid robots advised and backed by Eric Trump, failed to pay employees last month as its cash reserves dwindled, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Workers have yet to receive paychecks after San Francisco-based Foundation missed payroll on Oct. 30, said the people, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly about a private company.

The situation has particularly angered some inside the startup because its CEO and co-founder, Sankaet Pathak, borrowed $4.6 million from the company last year to buy a luxury home, money that could have been used to pay workers, the people said.

Public records show that an LLC that names Pathak as sole principal purchased a $4.6 million Sausalito, California, property with “sweeping, cinematic views” of the San Francisco Bay in October 2025.

A spokesman for Pathak acknowledged receiving a detailed list of the major points from this story on Thursday, but didn’t respond to requests for comment. Pathak’s previous startup, a fintech firm named Synapse, collapsed in 2024, leaving thousands of Americans locked out of their savings accounts.

Foundation’s cash crunch comes at a precarious moment for the company, which Pathak has said is close to unveiling a next-generation, weapons-ready robot that will help the U.S. compete against Chinese rivals. At the same time, Pathak is seeking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding at a $3 billion valuation.

The company has garnered headlines this year for Pathak’s claims that his robots could soon take on battlefield tasks in Ukraine or patrol the U.S. border with Mexico. Broadcast interviews and articles about Foundation also include claims that the company has won $24 million in Pentagon contracts.

“What we’re about to unveil in the next couple of months [is] going to be the strongest humanoid robot that exists anywhere in the world, including China,” Pathak said in an April television interview.

‘Plain sight’

That April interview introduced Eric Trump, the son of the U.S. president, as a Foundation investor and chief strategy advisor. It is unclear how large his stake is.

Eric Trump and his brother Donald Trump Jr. have invested in an array of defense firms, including makers of military drones and autonomous weapons. A July Washington Post investigation found that startups backed by investment vehicles linked to the brothers had secured at least $3.2 billion in government business.

“We have to win robotics in the United States of America,” Eric Trump said in April. “When you go up and interact with these robots ... they fist bump you, they high five you, they follow your commands.”

Eric Trump’s involvement in Foundation drew the swift ire of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who asked whether Foundation won U.S. defense contracts because of nepotism.

“Eric Trump went on FOX to brag about winning ANOTHER multimillion-dollar contract from the Trump administration,” Warren said in an April 23 social media post. “This looks like corruption in plain sight.”

by Hugh Son, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Aleksandra Michalska | Reuters
[ed. Is anyone surprised that corruption as an issue ranked so highly in this last election's political polling? When there's no accountability and a mind-numbingly long list of examples (like this)? See also: Kalshi Severs Its Relationship With Donald Trump Jr.; and, As Congress Plans Investigations, White House Prepares Ferocious Response (NYT).]

Robert Caro: Lessons in Power

What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years

[ed. Video interview with Dwarkesh Patel. In preparation for this interview Mr. Patel provides a short overview of two of Mr. Caro's subjects: Robert Moses (The Power Broker), and Lyndon Johnson (Master of the Senate): What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses:]

*****

I recently interviewed Robert Caro. He’s spent the last 50 years writing a four volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, and he spent another 7 years before that writing the biography of Robert Moses, the master builder of New York. His books are widely regarded as the best explorations of political power that have ever been written. [...] 

I’ve spent so much time trying to make this interview happen: chasing his agent, calling his publisher, contacting the museums that have his archives, and even sending him handwritten letters.

I finally got to sit down with him, and I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’ll be out this Friday.

In the meantime, as I was preparing for the interview, and rereading these biographies, I wrote down the lessons they laid out about how to accumulate and use power.

Robert Moses

Robert Moses was the master builder of New York. He built more of the physical city than anyone before or since: the Triborough and Verrazano bridges, the Cross Bronx Expressway, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, two giant power dams upstate, in addition to hundreds of parks and dozens of pools. Of the 899 miles of highways completed in New York State by 1964, Moses had built 672 of them. His projects collectively cost hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money.

For more than 30 years, Robert Moses was the most powerful person in New York (more powerful than any elected mayor or governor, despite not being elected to anything). How did he get and keep that much power?

Exploits in law

Part of the answer is that Moses wrote the laws that governed him. He was called ‘the best bill drafter in Albany,’ and he used that skill to write himself powers that the legislators voting on his bills didn’t know they were granting. [...]  [ed. Example: Triborough Bridge Authority Act of 1933. Moses snuck a few small clauses and seemingly insignificant words into the Act that no one noticed.]

So, with just a few minor tweaks, Moses turned an act meant to allow the construction of two bridges into the basis of an institution that could build basically anything it wanted anywhere in New York (and whose authority to do so was protected by the U.S. Constitution).

The indispensable man

These bond covenants had turned Triborough Authorities’ power into granite, but nothing in them guaranteed that Robert Moses would remain as chairman. So how did Moses retain his position for 30 years?

Part of the answer is, again, the law. Moses drafted the Triborough act so that its commissioners could be removed mid-term only “on stated charges after a formal hearing.” But any differences he had with a mayor or governor were more about what he decided to build and whom he displaced to build it, rather than personal conduct.

As Caro says, “Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was, in fact, as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived. In the politicians’ phrase, he was ‘money honest.’”

So, there were never any formal charges to bring. But this only explains why he wasn’t fired in the middle of his term. Why was he reappointed every six years? Well, at his peak, Moses was a hydra with a dozen heads. He held 12 different government posts at the same time: city construction coordinator, chairman of the State Council of Parks, chairman of the State Power Authority, and so on. Some of these positions were appointed by the mayor, some by the governor, so no single person could cut off all his heads simultaneously. And removing him from any one position meant making an enemy of the man who would still be the most powerful person in New York.

The coalition for yes

And the power that Moses derived from his popularity with the masses was nothing compared to the power he derived from his connections with New York’s powerful private interests.

We are very used today to NIMBY, where powerful but concentrated interest groups manage to stymie projects despite their broad popularity. Moses built a concentrated faction for YIMBY. He built a graft machine that greased the wheels for new construction, because it ensured the most influential people in the state would all benefit whenever a project got underway.

The banks got to buy his bonds at a steep discount without competitive bidding, the unions got more jobs, politically connected lawyers got legal fees, and party bosses got paid to broker insurance policies on bridges that had no plausible risk of falling down. Moses could then rely on these beneficiaries to call up anyone who stood in the way of one of his projects, whether that was a borough president or the governor himself. [...]

Lyndon Johnson’s story, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite. For most of his career, there was little evidence he had a coherent political ideology - he was a ruthless power-seeker who embraced whatever happened to be most expedient at the time. When Johnson first entered the U.S. Senate, he realized that the most powerful men there were conservative Southern Dixiecrats. And the Johnson that they encountered was one who had molded himself to their form.

While writing Master of the Senate, Caro interviewed former Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He asked Talmadge what impression he got from freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson about the proper relationship between white people and black people.

“Master and servant.” So I [Caro] asked, Well didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for blacks, any desire to improve their lot? My notes say “long pause.” And then I wrote [Talmadge’s] two-word reply: “None indicated.” Another pause, and then: “He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him.”

Of course, we know that once he became president, Johnson spearheaded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction.

So Moses began as a naive idealist but, in Caro’s telling, became someone seeking power for its own sake. Johnson was an ambitious opportunist from the very start, and it was only once he had real power that he used it for ideals few knew he had.

Lyndon Johnson

Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Senate majority leader - perhaps the most powerful legislator period - in the history of this country. Here’s Caro in Master of the Senate:

He was master of the Senate—master of an institution that had never before had a master, and that at the time, almost half a century later, when this book is being written, has not had one since.

No leader before Johnson had wielded this kind of power, because the Senate had been deliberately set up by the founders to not be “led”. When Johnson asked the Library of Congress for a list of the Majority Leader’s formal powers, he found that there was only one: the right to be recognized first on the floor. Before Johnson, the Majority Leader was less a leader and more a lightning rod. He’d be blamed in the national press and in his home state for everything the Senate failed to do, yet he had no actual power to do anything about those failures. Being in this predicament was so politically toxic that Johnson’s two predecessors as majority leaders had both lost their own Senate seats.

A big part of the reason that Johnson became his party’s leader at just 44, in a Senate whose average age was around 60, was that hardly anyone else wanted such a thankless and useless job. And in their hands, this job would have remained useless. But they were not Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson turned himself into the second most powerful man in America (right behind the president) in three different ways.

Things to promise, things to threaten with

Johnson transformed the Senate’s rules, institutions and norms so that he alone had the power to grant important favors to his colleagues. If a senator needed a bill passed, Johnson was the one who could get it scheduled on the floor and persuade the committee chairman to report it out. If the bill needed help in the House, Johnson was the one with a direct line to Speaker Sam Rayburn. And if the senator needed money for his next campaign (to ensure that he would remain a senator), Johnson was the one who could put in a good word with oilmen from his native Texas.

Johnson also put himself in a position to control committee assignments, which are the single biggest factor that shapes how a senator’s whole career plays out. For about a century, they had been handed out by seniority. Practically overnight, Johnson changed the system so that many seats were no longer being settled by seniority but rather negotiated by the party’s Steering committee, which Johnson controlled. If you wanted a good seat, you had to do what Johnson wanted. In 1957, Estes Kefauver voted against Johnson on an important motion. That very same week, the highly coveted open seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Kefauver was expecting to get, was instead handed over to a far more junior senator named John F. Kennedy.

The real political genius of Lyndon Johnson was identifying and then gaining control over every possible source of leverage over his colleagues. Whatever a senator needed to survive, whether that was money, committee seats, or the passage of bills that matter to his home state, Johnson could give, and Johnson could withhold.

Setting the agenda

What the final bill that passes says depends on which one version actually comes to a vote, and with what final modifications. Whoever gets to set the agenda controls the outcome. So you won’t be surprised by who put himself in this position. Johnson’s main tool for setting the agenda was the unanimous consent agreement. By default, Senate debate is unlimited. A senator can talk about a bill for as long as he likes, and as he does so, he can also offer amendments that have nothing to do with that bill, each of which can stall the bill even further. A unanimous consent agreement sets those freedoms aside for a single bill: it fixes the allotted time for debate and constrains the opportunity to amend it. Earlier leaders rarely used such agreements, and even then, only after weeks of debate on a bill had already exhausted all the senators. Johnson made their use the norm in the Senate. He wouldn’t even allow a bill to reach the floor until such an agreement was in place.

Johnson wanted to control which bill reached the floor, and to keep the floor from changing anyone’s mind, because he wanted every vote settled in private beforehand, through the wheeling-and-dealing where his leverage worked best. The last thing he wanted was for a long, public debate on the merits of the bill to change a senator’s mind at the last minute, or for a surprise amendment to unravel a deal he had spent weeks painstakingly brokering. As Paul Douglas put it, under Johnson “all the action takes place offstage, before the play begins.”

The view from the center

Johnson made sure that as much of the Senate’s information as possible ran through him. He had every committee assign a staffer to tell him what was being drafted. His aides tracked what every senator was up to. And he spent his own days in the cloakroom and the hallways cajoling and listening to his colleagues. So he knew what each senator really wanted, what he would and wouldn’t give up to get it.

In any session, the Senate faces hundreds of possible bills and amendments. A senator’s vote on one bill can be traded for another senator’s vote on a different one, and any single bill can be amended a dozen ways to win someone over. So there’s an almost endless combination of possible deals to be made. Johnson made sure that he was the one instigating and brokering most of these deals. As a result, he could make sure that any deal left Johnson coming out ahead.

by Dwarkesh Patel, Podcast |  Read more:

Images: Abebooks

Nvidia Sockpuppets Spring Into Action

Hundreds of fake accounts defended Jensen Huang and attacked lawmakers over chip exports.

Late last week, the Financial Times reported that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was believed by U.S. intelligence to have had an affair with a Chinese spy. The alleged spy was a business executive whom American officials warned China recruited to gather information on the company and potentially push for chip exports to China.

In the following days, as the story bounced around social media, dozens of accounts rushed to Huang’s defense. They dismissed the report as resting on anonymous sources and insufficient evidence. Six of them said, in nearly the same words, that Huang had already made clear in May that Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin chips weren’t going to China — and thus concerns about the chip export angle were overblown.

The accounts belong to a network of over 400 apparent sockpuppet accounts that appear to have spent years promoting messages for various clients, including, over the past year, taking Nvidia’s side in Washington’s fight over selling advanced AI chips to China. The same network is actively supporting other causes, including backing the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan’s civil war, a group the United States has accused of genocide.

In a comment to The Midas Project, an Nvidia spokesperson said the company recently became aware of these accounts and is trying to identify the source but has so far been unsuccessful.

Since November 2025, when the network became active on this topic, the accounts have posted thousands of times, generally taking Nvidia’s side on hot-button discussions across X, Bluesky, and Reddit. Their primary topic has been export controls, the rules limiting which AI chips U.S. companies can sell to China. In addition, they’ve defended Nvidia as a company and Huang personally, dismissed the severity of chip smuggling, attacked Anthropic for its views on AI safety, and generally written off concerns about the technology and calls to slow the industry down. [...]

Of the more than 400 accounts The Midas Project has identified, most present themselves as Americans: X lists about 80% as based in the United States, though for nearly all of those it warns that the location “may not be accurate,” suggesting the account connects through a VPN or proxy. They pose as everyday users, including day traders, a nurse’s aide, a data scientist, a pencil-sketch artist, and environmentalists. Between campaign posts, they chat about sports, pets, and celebrities.

Several lines of evidence tie these accounts together. Most were set up in batches, created within an hour of another account in the same network, across dozens of individual account-creation sessions. The largest session lasted two and a half hours on Nov. 9, 2021, during which about 30 accounts were created. The vast majority of accounts in the network were created, renamed, or given new profile pictures or banners in the same sessions as other accounts in the network, often minutes apart. Many also seem to release their posts through scheduling software, with the post going live within the first half-second of a new minute. At times, the accounts will also slip up and post virtually identical text on two or more different accounts.

Nvidia isn’t the only shared interest that these accounts have. Over the years, this network of accounts has advocated for a variety of causes, seemingly on behalf of both corporate and political clients. This has included campaigns benefiting Israel, pharmacy benefit managers, manufacturing companies, and, most recently, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. One of the most distinctive traits of accounts in this network, beyond being set up or reskinned in the same session as other accounts, is their participation in multiple highly specific campaigns.

The network’s best-documented campaign, and its largest by volume, appears to be one exposed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Project Lighthouse,” a pro-Qatar effort that Haaretz reported was devised by a firm run by two aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In its reporting, Haaretz named 15 of the campaign’s fake accounts. Most of those named accounts have since participated in the pro-Nvidia campaign, and dozens more are connected to these Haaretz-named accounts through shared account setup and reskinning sessions.

Haaretz reported that Koios, a small Israeli company that presents itself as a firm that detects financial fraud online, ran the fake accounts. Koios denied any involvement. Israeli police have since raided its offices as part of their investigation into Qatar’s ties to Netanyahu’s office, and as of September 2025, the company claims to have ceased operations. But the social media accounts did not stop. Soon after, they began their campaign on AI chips and Nvidia.

Indeed, Koios’ business appears to have carried on under a new name: IntellACT (sometimes written as IntellACTS). Not to be confused with the identically named Israeli aviation company (a choice that may have been designed to make the company harder to trace), IntellACT seems to have emerged around the time its website was registered in September 2025, the day before Koios’ liquidators were appointed, and the same month Koios said it ceased operations. [....]

Between the job listing for social media account operators, the posting habits of these accounts, and even occasional operator mistakes discernible from their posts, it appears these are not bots but sockpuppets. That is, the accounts are likely human-operated, with workers scrolling social media manually and typing replies to posts, often with the help of AI and likely a script. In fact, the most revealing evidence of this comes from one operator mistake where a network account, presumably trying to create lifestyle filler content, wrote, “Create a reply on X (Twitter) for this post. The goal is to get a lot of engagement while still sounding like a real human. Use emojis if appropriate. 280 characters or less. Provide 3 options.” Four different posts also call Nvidia “NCore,” which may be a codename from a brief the operators work from.

Comparing the accounts against the web archive also reveals that deleting posts is common for accounts in the network. This tracks with what sources told Haaretz in 2025: that clearing out old posts was standard practice for Koios. The accounts regularly remove their campaign posts weeks or months after publishing them, while leaving their everyday chatter up. Of the over 4,000 posts about chips and AI the network has made since November 2025, approximately two-thirds are already gone. And in the hours before this article was published, dozens of the network’s accounts were suddenly deactivated, and others began deleting posts supporting Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces.

I have previously covered two separate social media campaigns focused on chip and data center policy that I speculated Nvidia may have been behind. I also covered a similar campaign promoting videos from Innovation Council Action, a pro-industry group incorporated around the time this Nvidia campaign began (and which I similarly speculated could have links to Nvidia). But when asked for comment on this campaign, Innovation Council Action suggested it wasn't aware of it. IntellACT didn’t respond to my attempts to reach it, while the Koios liquidator claimed that no company assets were sold or transferred and that there is no record of interaction between Koios and Nvidia. Koios said via a generic company email that it “has no connection to this matter” and that it ceased operations in September 2025. And an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement: “We have no relationship with those firms and have not asked any other party to engage them on our behalf. Recently, we also became aware of these accounts and are attempting to identify the source, which has so far been unsuccessful.” With all this in mind, who might have been funding a complex, yearlong operation like this remains unclear and may never be known without a more formal investigation.

Could a formal investigation be warranted? I certainly think so. This appears to have been a yearlong campaign designed to shape one of the most important policy debates in Washington. A network of hundreds of fake accounts made thousands of posts arguing Nvidia’s side of the debate over selling AI chips to China, defended its chief executive through a spy scandal, and went after the commentators pushing hardest for export controls, including U.S. lawmakers — only to later delete much of what they said. These accounts are directly linked to a supposedly defunct Israeli influence firm that police raided over a covert pro-Qatar campaign, and the firm has since filed for liquidation. The same accounts are currently running other campaigns, including one backing Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a group the United States has accused of genocide.

Who is ultimately behind this campaign, we don’t know. But the chips at the center of this fight may be the most strategically important technology of our time, and whether China gets them is being decided now. A debate this important can be quietly influenced by manufactured voices. It can be done cheaply, apparently from abroad, with the evidence scrubbed afterward. That should worry anyone who cares about the policy decisions that result, no matter which side they’re on.

by Tyler Johnson, The Midas Project | Read more:
Images: X/Reddit

[ed. And we wonder how people get manipulated and cult-brained. Do read: Send in the Sockpuppets (DWAV).]

'An Insane Scandal’: How Jensen Huang’s Downfall Could Change Everything

The downfall of arguably the single most important person in AI is a massive story. But the implications and insinuations of this scandal go deeper, touching on everything from American national security, US-China relations, the future of the AI buildout, chip export policies, your retirement account, and an existential debate among AI experts about who should have access to the most advanced AI chips. [...]

CHAPTER 1: THE MAIN CHARACTERS
The CEO, the Spy, and the Singapore Question

Can you tell me the gist in one sentence?

The chief executive of Nvidia had multiple affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy, who was an executive at a Singapore company that bought billions of dollars of Nvidia chips and is suspected of illegally redirecting them to Chinese companies in violation of American law.

Can you explain the larger stakes of the scandal in one sentence?

It’s probably something like this: It’s sketchy for chief executives to have affairs with their employees and major clients; sketchier still for them to have affairs with clients whose business is suspected of violating federal law; even sketchier for that paramour to also be a suspected secret agent of a foreign government; maximally sketchy if that foreign government is America’s top geopolitical adversary; and beyond all reckoning of sketchiness if the US government knew of these allegations and revelations and did approximately f*ck-all about it for months.

We’ll get to the nitty-gritty of everything in that sentence further down in the piece, but that’s basically what we’re dealing with here.

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: X
[ed. See also:  Jensen Huang Resigns After Having Another Affair In Addition to the Chinese Spy (DWAV). Do check out these videos:]

*****

If you haven’t seen it, this short AI video is obligatory, as is this one.

The Daily Show has coverage of stage one. They weren’t being all that subtle, huh? 

Table of Contents

1. A Second Ant in the Kitchen.

2. There Was Going to Be an Investigation.

3. Jensen Huang Had to Resign.

4. Seven Billion in Sales to China Enabled by Jensen’s Ties to Alice Huang.

5. Jensen Huang Attempted to Make Himself Unfireable.

6. A Remarkable Lack of Contagion.

7. Even Now There Are Those Defending Jensen Huang.

8. Send in the Sockpuppets.

9. Okay Maybe We Came on a Little Strong.

10. Past Scandal at the Commerce Department.

11. New Scandal at the Commerce Department.

12. Chip Export Controls Gain Momentum.

13. Reminder That Compute Is Very Important.

14. If You Can’t Even Have an Affair With a Chinese Spy.

15. What Happens Next?

This Winning Combination Is the Future of American Politics

President Trump’s unpopularity was clearly the main engine of Democratic Party’s resounding midterm victory. But his unpopularity alone did not deliver the scale of the Democrats triumph. To win in places like Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, Democratic candidates needed to persuade many voters who had previously considered their party unacceptable. The candidates’ success offers a road map to a sensible future for the party.

How did they do it? The simplest summary is that they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.

That combination is consistent with American public opinion, which leans center-left on many economic issues and center-right on many social issues. By taking this approach, candidates were able to present themselves as beholden to neither of the country’s two political parties, both of which remain unpopular. The heterodox combination also has much to recommend it substantively. It meets the moment, after years of disappointing laissez-faire economic policies and a decade of cultural excesses by the progressive left.

On the economy, this year’s Democrats offered a strikingly populist message. They promised to raise taxes on the wealthy and criticized billionaires for corrupting the political system. They called for higher minimum wages, lower health care costs and expanded government programs. They raised concerns about artificial intelligence and data centers. They did not sound like the triangulating Democratic moderates of an earlier generation who championed Wall Street and free trade.

Nor did they sound like the progressives who shaped the party during the 2010s and early 2020s. This year’s candidates frequently denounced ideas — on immigration, energy, policing, gender and voter ID — that have taken hold in elite left-leaning circles and alienated many working-class Americans of all races. Winning candidates often took a middle ground between a censorious left and an extremist Republican Party. If you do not live in a place with a 2026 battleground campaign, you may not realize how strongly the Democrats turned toward social moderation.

Adam Hamilton, a pastor who became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Kansas since 1932, captured the mood in an ad in which he spoke directly to the camera while standing on a farm. “America is being torn apart by politicians on both extremes,” he said, placing himself in the populist middle, in contrast to his Republican opponent, Senator Roger Marshall. “On one side, the far left pushes socialism and open borders,” Mr. Hamilton said. “On the other side, Roger Marshall gives us higher gas and grocery prices while slashing our health care.”

Our editorial board does not agree with every message that came from a Democrat this year, and we lament that the party did not do more to lay out an affirmative agenda for lifting Americans’ living standards. Democrats should urgently begin that work. Nonetheless, the 2026 campaign represented meaningful progress for the party.

Even as the factional battles between the party’s left and center will no doubt continue, the Democrats who won difficult races this year largely borrowed the strongest messages from each side. They demonstrated an admirable pragmatism and a willingness to compromise that are central to maintaining democracy in a diverse nation. As Rob Sand, Iowa’s governor-elect, said during his campaign, “I think a lot of people are tired of division, tired of being told that anyone that they love or who’s a friend of theirs that’s in the other party is somehow their enemy.”

Coalescing around a similar big-tent strategy will be crucial in 2028. The competition between Democratic and Republican candidates today is not merely one about policy. It is, unfortunately, a contest between a party that supports democracy and one that has enabled corruption, lawbreaking and autocratic behavior. The country would be far better off if the Republicans pivoted and nominated a candidate in 2028 who rejected Trumpism. Until Republicans return to being a normal political party, however, the effectiveness of the Democratic Party will remain more than a partisan question. It will affect the health of American democracy.

For most of the 21st century, most Americans have been unhappy with the country’s direction. The reasons are complex and varied, including failed foreign wars, alienation caused by digital technology, slow-growing living standards and deep anxiety about the future. The country is stuck in a long malaise.

This dissatisfaction extends to voters’ views of the two major political parties. Only 38 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the Republican Party heading into the midterms, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. The Democratic Party’s favorability was barely better, at 39 percent. Many voters say neither party is sufficiently focused on the concerns of ordinary people. Swing voters tend to consider the Republican Party too right wing and the Democratic Party too left wing.

As a result, successful candidates in modern politics often present themselves as being distinct from both parties. They emphasize their disagreements with their own party and highlight their openness to working with anybody who has a good idea. That was a theme among Democrats who won tough races this year.

“It’s time to stop the nonsense from both extremes and start to focus on lowering costs for Iowans,” said Josh Turek, who calls himself a “common-sense prairie populist” and became the first Democrat to win an Iowa Senate race in 18 years. Another Turek ad boasted that he had voted with Republicans more than 700 times in the state legislature. In Ohio, Representative Marcy Kaptur, who won a House district that Mr. Trump easily won two years ago, told voters, “I’ve repeatedly said no to my own party.” In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who leads her Senate race pending a final vote count, said, “When both parties are attacking you, you’re doing something right.”

To demonstrate independence, this year’s Democratic winners took positions on hot-button culture issues at odds with recent progressive consensus. On each one, they rejected the excesses of both sides and found a sensible middle. Five issues stood out: [ed. Immigration, Crime, Voter ID, Energy, Gender]

The mistake among some centrists has been believing that the right answer to every policy question lies in the middle of the two parties’ historical positions. In truth, the country needs bold action on many issues. Americans, frustrated by slow-growing living standards and government dysfunction, are hungry for action on the economy.

Many of this year’s winning Democrats promised such action. They called for tax increases on corporations and billionaires, along with a smorgasbord of policies to reduce costs and increase opportunities for most Americans. The all-of-the-above position on energy helps as well.

Mr. Shapiro, often described as a moderate, supported more than doubling Pennsylvania’s minimum wage, to $15. Mr. Turek called for indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation and making it easier for workers to join unions. Ms. Peltola called for a big increase in the child tax credit and tax incentives for companies that pay decent wages. Mr. Hamilton said Medicare should expand to include dental and vision coverage. Mr. Pulido called for breaking up health-care conglomerates. “The people in office have sold us out,” he said. “They’ve allowed these companies to prey on us.”

Along the way, many candidates, including Mr. El-Sayed, drew a limit on their economic progressivism and said that they were not socialists. They described themselves as capitalists who wanted to ensure that American capitalism delivered better results for its citizens.

Democrats still do not have anything close to a comprehensive economic agenda. Many of their ideas remain small-bore or even dubious, especially on housing, where the party is not focused enough on building more homes. It has also failed to produce a plan to reduce the alarming federal debt. The party should raise its ambitions and spend the coming months developing an agenda that will reduce housing and health care costs, regulate A.I., put the country on a sustainable fiscal path and more.

This project will not be easy, but it does not need to tear the party apart. The progressive and centrist wings of the party agree much more on economic issues than they disagree.

Two years ago, the situation was bleak for the Democratic Party. Its ineffectiveness and unpopularity enabled Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, and many Democrats were in denial about why they lost. The party has rebounded from that nadir.

This year, it fielded a diverse array of savvy, appealing and authentic candidates, and they won astonishing victories. Their combination of economic populism and cultural moderation offers the party an opportunity to change its image among working-class Americans who have long viewed it as out of touch and condescending. Common-sense populism presents the most promising path to building an enduring Democratic majority in Washington. Yes, the party still has a long way to go before it can govern the country well and force the Republican Party to return to reasonableness. But the victors of 2026 have started to point the way.

by The Editors, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tam Stockton/NYT

[ed. As this article suggests, I'd be happy if they just started going after corporations that've ripped off consumers in various and creative ways over years and decades (thanks, Reagan). No small effort given that Big Business is so embedded in nearly every facet of our lives now. At least this election showed that big money can be beaten and isn't necessarily as influential as having a good message (and cult-loving opponents).]

A World Of Pain

Dr. M.R. Rajagopal is haunted by the memory of his cousin’s nightly cries echoing through his village. His cousin had no pain relief for flare-ups from a rare skin cancer on his scalp, which caused him immense pain. And his cousin was not the only person he was unable to help; his memoir details other occasions he was unable to do more for people in his care. In his early career, he was too cautious in administering morphine — an opioid — to a man who had burns on 70% of his body; he was afraid of creating an addict. For months, his patient was kept in agony with only a few hours of daily pain relief. Years later, the man bumped into Rajagopal and told him the ordeal almost destroyed him. Rajagopal was shattered — but the experience changed his approach to pain forever. Dr. Rajagopal went on to become a pioneer in modern Indian palliative medicine.

These anecdotes are from more than 40 years ago, but the patterns are hardly a thing of the past. Across rich and poor countries alike, people are still routinely failed through a lack of access to proper pain relief.

Having no access to pain relief can be agonizing. Cancer patients in Vietnam describe waiting for others to die so that they could get the leftover morphine. Kenyan patients speak of their wish to hasten their deaths due to their inability to find peace from pain. I experienced uncontrolled and agonizing pain myself when, as a child in Uruguay, I had second-degree burns on both legs. Without appropriate pain relief, my pain was more than just physical. As I counted down the hours to the next dressing change, the anxiety I experienced was just as distressing and memorable as the deep burn of the gauze coming unstuck from my raw flesh.

Some form of suffering is a core experience for most of us around the world. Depending on the country and survey, between 5% and 10% of people from the UK, US and Middle East report having pain that impedes their daily functioning. More than two-thirds of advanced cancer patients have serious pain, and recent estimates suggest over 70 million people endure at least one day of serious health-related suffering a year.

As populations grow older and we make gains against communicable disease, the burden of disease is shifting to chronic diseases like cancers and other diseases of old age, which can be painful and long-lasting. In much of the world, where people still can’t access good-quality healthcare, many conditions that are easily treatable remain serious causes of pain. We need better systems to help people deal with pain and death in a dignified way. [...]

For the Few, Not the Many

In some settings, suffering from a painful medical condition can be like a sentence to ongoing torture. This torture is far more common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) than in rich ones. 99% of children with serious health-related suffering are in LMICs. The lack of treatment for pain is especially common for the most severe types of pain, such as postsurgical and cancer pain. In Haiti, for instance, 99% of severe pain relief needs are unmet.

Worldwide, the top 10% of countries by opioid consumption consume as much as 90% of all distributed opioids (converted into doses with the potency of morphine).

To put this into perspective, one paper estimates that the average yearly controlled opioid consumption is 32 mg per person worldwide, but Germans consume around 480 mg per person. Note that this is not due to Germans overconsuming opioids; it is simply that pain elsewhere is not treated.

Many issues in global health and development can be boiled down to lack of money, but the lack of pain control is not one of them. Morphine is among the cheapest essential medicines out there; oral morphine for 10 days costs about the same as a loaf of bread. Instead, lack of pain management is driven by a fear of opioids’ side effects, accentuated by the opioid epidemic in the United States and the closely related War on Drugs.

Traditionally, clinicians have avoided using opioids as much as possible, as they can cause central nervous system depression. This reduces the rate of breathing and in doing so could potentially hasten death. As recently as 2012, a third of medical ethics educators in the United States believed this to be the case. However, while it is true that morphine and other opioids have a narrow therapeutic index, meaning that the safety margin for their use is fairly small, it is not true that they hasten death when correctly administered.

Doctors’ fears of overusing opioids have only increased with time. Opioids are addictive, and overuse is dangerous. The United States has experienced significant public health harm from the overprescription of opioids, with the opioid crisis peaking at perhaps 80,000 opioid-caused deaths per year. The start of the crisis was caused by the unscrupulous drug pushing of pharmaceutical companies for types of pain where opioids are not very helpful. In response, doctors became much more hesitant to prescribe. Indeed, doctors could even be prosecuted for overprescription.

But while this first wave of the opioid crisis in the U.S. was driven by the prescribing dynamics of doctors, this was not the lasting mechanism for increased opioid deaths into the 2020s. Between 2011 and 2021, opioid deaths tripled, even as opioid prescriptions decreased by nearly 40% during the same period. Pain medication might have kicked off the epidemic, but it was not the lasting driver. [...]

It is true that prescribing opioid pain medications comes with risks. Estimates of the true rate of opioid use disorder as a consequence of prescribing are very heterogeneous. One study has estimated the prevalence of problematic pharmaceutical opioid use at 9.3% in patients with non-cancer pain, while other studies estimated the risk as 0.2% for individuals with no preexisting addiction issues. Even a 0.2% risk of addiction is not trivial, but it must be weighed against the harm of leaving patients in debilitating pain.

Crucially, opioid pain medication must be treated like all other possibly addictive pain medications — worth the risk in some circumstances, but not in others. Different cases require different approaches. And when opioids are used in end-of-life settings, there are fewer concerns about addiction — if a patient is dying, even addiction might be a reasonable choice to make the last few months of their life more bearable.

But despite these nuances, over time, regulation has tended to tighten restrictions on pain relief, further constraining who can access relief.

Restrictions begin at the international level. Countries must report their need for opiates to the International Narcotics Control Board before importing them. Unfortunately, countries often underestimate their own needs for opioids and fear being seen as lax on drug control. Thus, they rarely choose to deviate from their current level of imports — even if it is far too low. Furthermore, since pain medication is not seen as “lifesaving,” it is an easy place for governments to cut corners. [...]

In many countries, the bureaucratic procedures one must follow to prescribe opioids remain difficult to navigate, too few clinicians are allowed to prescribe and updates in regulation take too long to trickle down to clinical practice.

Instead, clinicians lean heavily on ibuprofen and paracetamol. However, these medications are only suitable for fairly mild pain; for postsurgical pain and cancer pain, they barely make a dent. [...]

What Would It Take to Prioritize Pain?

Even in countries with excellent medication availability, progress in palliative care is often stuck for deeply human reasons: misconceptions, regulation, governance and lack of training. The barrier to good care is not medicine innovation but rather the lack of prioritization of pain control as a key part of treatment. Moreover, we need to change how people conceptualize palliative care. It is viewed as reserved for frail and dying people, which is perhaps why in the United States fewer than one in five young adults with advanced cancer get appropriate palliative care as part of their treatment.

Worldwide, most clinicians are still not properly trained in pain management and pain management specialists are very rare. Mozambique, a country of 35 million people, has just two physicians specializing in pain management. Zimbabwe, a country of 17 million people, has just two pain specialists. Pain management is often viewed as unimportant.

by Morgan Fairless, In Development |  Read more:

Image: By reference

[ed. Contrast this with the article below about the UK voting down assisted suicide. It's almost impossible to get opioid prescriptions these days, and millions of people are suffering.]

Some Thoughts on the Mid-Term Election

The Trump Decade Is Over. And a new chapter in American politics begins.

1. This was a generational wipeout for Republicans.

The Democratic Party’s margin of victory in the overall national vote for House seats is expected to be about 13 percentage points. That would be the largest Democratic rout in at least half a century, according to the New York Times. Two years after several news outlets announced that Trump had created a vibe shift in American history, we’re looking at a Watergate-level swing back to the left. [chart]

2. It was also a ‘generational’ moment for Democrats.

James Talarico is 37. Jon Ossoff is 39. Abdul El-Sayed is 42. Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand is 44. The political order that has governed America for most of my adult life has been overwhelmingly dominated by Baby Boomers. But the candidate class is changing. The “Mr. Brightside caucus” of Millennial libs has an opportunity to write a new chapter in American politics.

3. Donald Trump is very good at running for president, but he is very bad at being president.

The problem with Donald Trump is not simple. It’s not just that he’s a bad president whose final pitch to voters involved talking endlessly about the shape of men’s butts and the ins and outs of White House renovations. It’s not just that he’s devoted himself to corrupt self-enrichment, spending his afternoons coating the White House ballroom in gold leaf while Americans struggle to afford gas. It’s not just that Americans increasingly oppose every single policy priority of the administration. It’s not just that he responded to frustrations about border control by dialing up a brutal immigration enforcement policy that destroyed 100 percent of his gains among Hispanic voters. It’s not just that he won a cost of living election in 2024 and then moved immediately to raise import prices with a historic tariff regime and then followed that up by sending gas and diesel prices higher by invading Iran in a military action that at once violated two campaign promises—to do something about high prices and to do nothing regarding military involvement in the Middle East. No, the deeper problem is that, on top of all of this, the man just plain sucks at candidate selection. Trump pushed out popular conservative senators in Texas and North Carolina for insufficient loyalty and backed horrendous wannabes that gave Democrats a chance to win in parts of the country where not even the most hopium-addled lib would have dreamed of winning in January 2025.

That Donald Trump is a unique political talent cannot be denied. But what kind of political talent is he, really? The president is now 2-0 running as an outsider trying to wrest the presidency from Democratic hands (2016 and 2024) but 0-3 in elections where he is already the president (2018, 2020, 2026). In an age of anti-incumbency, Trump is the epitome of the incumbent curse, a generational genius of charismatic negativity who has no idea what to do with the reins of power once he seizes them—other than marshal the machinery of the federal government to drive public opinion against him. [ed. See also: this (Nov. 6, 2026).]

4. Democrats, don’t lie to yourselves: This is not a permanent realignment. The middle is molten.

Two years after almost every demographic shifted right, literally every demographic shifted toward Democrats, according to the New York Times. The biggest shifts were among voters under 30 (+32%), men under 45 (+31%), and Hispanics (+28%). Two years ago, some commentators—like me!—speculated that Trump had captured young voters and made serious inroads among Hispanics. But on Tuesday, those groups moved toward Democrats more dramatically than any other. [chart]

Is it a permanent realignment? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that, in the 2020s—an era of high inflation, high interest rates, low institutional trust, global crises, and existential fears about climate change and AI—there are a lot of loosely attached independent voters who can toggle from party to party. Young voters and nonwhite voters (who are, themselves, disproportionately younger than whites) are not so much punching tickets to join a party as they are leasing one-year terms to vote for one group, only to punish them in the next election if things don’t improve. 

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa

[ed. See also: Seventeen thoughts on an epic repudiation of Donald Trump (Slow Boring).]

U.K. Parliament Votes Down Assisted Suicide Bill

U.K. lawmakers... voted down a bill to legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill adults in England and Wales.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was narrowly rejected, with 286 members of the House of Commons voting against the bill and 270 members voting in favor.

The bill passed the Commons last year but unelected lawmakers in the House of Lords effectively filibustered the legislation by introducing more than 1,200 amendments. Friday’s vote ends a push by proponents of assisted suicide to revive the bill.

The bill, if passed, would have allowed for patients with less than six months to live to apply for assisted suicide. Then, two doctors and a panel of experts would determine if the patient qualified, Only adults would have been able to apply for assisted suicide. [...]

During debate, lawmaker and cancer surgeon Zubir Ahmed brought up concerns about accurately predicting the timeline of a patient’s prognosis.

“I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right,” Ahmed, a member of the Labour Party, said. “It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death.”

Ashley Dalton, also a member of the Labour Party, said there is no reason to expect that without access to assisted suicide, dying will be a horrible experience.

“In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the U.K. is excellent,” Dalton said.

“Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own feces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare … It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.”

by Kamden Mulder, National Review |  Read more:

Image: Jack Taylor/Reuters
[ed. Shameful. Ask anyone: what are you more afraid of, death or dying? Palliative care can be costly, unpredictable, prolonged, and not just simple pain relief. What about choice, dignity, and the emotional burden on families? We routinely euthanize pets out of sense of love and empathy, so why not humans? From the moment we're born we're taught to control ourselves, then at the end of life the state takes that away. Shameful.]

An Easy Fix to Expand Housing Inventory

Cheaper manufactured homes could be having a moment, if only states can catch up. A new law could make manufactured homes cheaper, but old zoning barriers could slow their expansion.

For decades, manufactured home builders have been working to shed the old image of boxy trailer homes reserved for the outskirts of cities and suburbia. Now, a small change in federal regulations could open the door for architecture welcomed in more neighborhoods.

This summer’s sweeping housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, removed a 1974 mandate that required every manufactured home to be built on a nonremovable steel frame, known as a chassis. Experts and home producers think the change could help unlock thousands more affordable housing options around the country.

But first, experts say, states have to examine outdated regulations that are blocking the manufactured home industry’s potential. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing initiative estimates that 30 states might need to change their regulations to align with the new federal law.

Unlocking manufactured homes from chassis will allow manufactured homes to become multi-family developments, said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

They’ll be cheaper for builders, she noted, and they’ll be easier to stack into two-story and multi-family homes.

“First of all, you were putting a very heavy, expensive thing on the bottom of these homes that is not needed and it is not used, and it’s made out of steel,” Hawke said. “If you’ve got this heavy piece of steel on the bottom of a home, stacking it becomes more difficult.”

Manufactured homes are built entirely in a factory, regulated by U.S. Housing and Urban Development codes, and then trucked to a home site.

They cost 50% less per square foot than homes built on a site, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry group. And experts say dropping the chassis could drive down costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per home.

“There’s really the opportunity to stack these manufactured homes to make multi-family developments,” Hawke said. “So it’s unlocking this thing which was primarily used for single-family and it’s making it much more accessible for a multi-family developer, which is great because manufactured housing is far and away the least expensive non-subsidized housing supply in the United States.”

In a 2026 earnings call, UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate company that owns and develops manufactured-home communities, said the chassis rule change will allow it to put two-story manufactured homes on existing lots. The company also is considering designs that could combine two stories with duplex units, allowing for smaller, more affordable apartment rentals.

“You build 2,000 square feet of homes instead of 1,000 square feet on the same piece of land. It’s a very, very important development,” said Eugene Landy, founder and chairman of UMH Properties, on the earnings call. “This is a change that’s gonna help every manufactured home community out in the country.”

Another benefit to removing the chassis, according to Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured & Modular Home Association of Minnesota, is that manufactured homes can blend more seamlessly into subdivisions because they won’t look too different from other homes. [...]

Following World War II, a shift in how mobile homes were being used began forming. No longer reserved as temporary housing, mobile homes were designed to be increasingly more permanent. Mobile home communities sprang up, though many were zoned into rural or suburban areas on a city’s edge.

For decades, manufactured homes — called mobile homes until the early 1970s — have been built in factories and trucked to their new locale. Many were unloaded into mobile home communities, specialized zoning districts where residents own their house but rent the land underneath. [...]

In the past, a home attached to a trailer or visibly hoisted a few feet off the ground were tells of manufactured housing when they first popped up in neighborhoods. But many modern ones are virtually unrecognizable from site-built homes.

“They have the same walls, ceiling, sheetrock, windows and shingles,” said Dustin Brakemeier, who owns and operates manufactured home communities in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “One’s built in a factory, one’s built outside. They’re the same.’”

 
Changing zoning, mortgage rules

Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Dan Moul, who owns a manufactured home park in Oxford Township in Adams County, recalled in an interview that zoning restrictions kept him from expanding the community into an adjoining parcel a few years ago. The township said the land was zoned exclusively for detached single-family residential housing.

“The bottom line is they look at mobile home communities as that’s where the poor riffraff lives, and we don’t want any more riffraff,” Moul said.

One of the big domino effects from the removal of the chassis requirement could be state banning or overriding restrictive local zoning policies that targeted manufactured homes. [...]

Alex Rodino, a real estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, who sells manufactured homes, said the stigma isn’t just among local governments and stodgy neighborhood groups. Some buyers, he said, are confusing modern manufactured housing with the image of older mobile homes.

“I think (that perception) is slowly changing as construction quality improves and traditional housing becomes less affordable,” said Rodino.

by Robbie Sequeira, Stateline | Read more:
Image: Jon King/Michigan Advance
[ed. See also: A New ROAD for Factory-Built Homes: States Must Act in Coming Year (Pew).]

Childhood and Education: Voice Without Exit

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school.

Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so.

The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? [...]

New York City PS 307

Nikole sent her daughter Najya to PS 307 entirely by her own choice.

She felt, by her own description, an obligation to her sense of the common good at the expense of her daughter.

Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was when her daughter thought all the better schools would cost money.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

Yeah, pretty much. As many others said, it was a very brave and praiseworthy decision to write this post. It does not make up for the events that gave her the opportunity to write it. I won’t get into the minefield of trying to understand her logic, except that she put various ideological abstractions ahead of her daughter’s education.

Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps

I can sort of understand trying this at the start, but it got increasingly unreasonable as the years went on and Nikole got more information.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.

Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”

It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults.

This is where she fully loses me. This happens, and then she sends her daughter back for second grade. That’s all the information you need. You have a neighborhood public school that isn’t this one. What the hell? And yes, it is both the adults and the kids, both acting that way in part because of each other.

She tried to ‘stay and fight for the students who did not have options.’ She learned that the teachers did not care, on the level of often not showing up and having substitutes that didn’t teach, and the Principal couldn’t be bothered to show up either. Then in fourth grade she learned her daughter was behind on all subjects, and when she emailed the staff, she got ignored. What did she expect?

PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent

Then it got better, or worse, depending on your perspective.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.

That’s fraud. And also rather evil. Nikole has the types of connections that can start investigations. Why are we only learning about this now? Like, what?

Then, Najya’s math assignments were found, mostly wrong, entirely ungraded. Again, what was the plan? Keep nagging the same people who don’t care?

But, somehow, Nikole decided she needed to ‘keep fighting,’ by running into the same brick wall, rather than save her drowning daughter. I don’t really know what she was expecting. These people knew Nikole was literally a New York Times reporter on inequality. They also, correctly, figured out she was not going to do anything that threatened them.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?

Moving In Unison

The story briefly improves at the middle school, Unison, but one quickly notices that all the positive anecdotes are signaling. There is a food-justice club and trips and “Hamilton” and Black History Month. Nothing wrong with any of that, but basics first, and then Nikole noticed the students never got homework and the teachers could not control the classrooms. And so on.

A Good School

Having not gotten into the top schools because she was unprepared for the test, and not being allowed to pick private schools, her daughter tried all that was left.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): I would give her absolute autonomy, with the exception that she had to choose a public school. She would research them, she would decide which ones she wanted us to visit and she would choose where she applied.

A few days later, Najya handed me a list. Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.

Najya got into a ‘good’ school with strong academics, and as one would expect was overwhelmed because she’d previously never even been assigned homework. She’d failed the Algebra test the year before, but Nikole assumed that was just bad test taking, rather than (of course) that the school had failed to teach her math for years. Unison does ‘Algebra for all’ as a supposed college gateway, and the way they did it was they just passed everyone without teaching the kids algebra.

What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?

The story has a happy ending. With intense help, Najya catches up and acclimates. Which raises the question of what all those years of school are even for in the first place. If Najya was never taught academics, and Najya never got good discipline or socialization because of classroom conditions being anarchic, and it took less than a year to have her back on her feet, what were those eight years even for?

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Unison had eliminated homework because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement, and that assigning it often sets up for failure students who are so academically behind that they cannot do the work on their own.

Doesn’t this challenge the entire educational system at its core? We are basically saying that nothing matters, and all that work is for show, unless you need to be on some sort of cutting edge or elite track.

Also, I hate to be the one to say it, but if you really want to do homework, it’s not like you can’t come up with some homework.

The worst torture of all, perhaps, comes near the end.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): One day in June as I was immersed in writing this essay, my phone rang. It was Najya. She’s now 16 and was finishing the final weeks of her sophomore year. She was making her daily call for lunch money, a ritual I created to force her to check in with me once during the school day.

Okay, that’s it. Forcing your 16-year-old to call you in the middle of every school day or she starves? Nikole is a monster.

The Project Was Ideological

It was all her choice, and it was clearly done for ideological reasons.

Jack: In all the talk about NHJ sending her child to a high-poverty school, I think it’s been under-mentioned: she could have chosen her neighborhood school. She did not. She hand-picked a school with the demographics, amenities, and faculty she wanted, then used private tutoring.

Of course her daughter was mad! Her mom used her resources just as every rich parent does, choosing a well-resourced school in line with her values, but the values were “My child should be in a school with poor kids and receive private tutoring to compensate for bad instruction.”

Hostage theory, except the only hostage-taker is a parent with self-contradictory values around education.

She started the private tutoring when her daughter was in fourth grade and continued bragging about the approach through 2024.

Jack Despain Zhou: There are two stories I could tell you right now, in the wake of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral article about her daughter’s education.

The first is this: The Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer of the 1619 Project sent her daughter Najya to an impoverished, majority-black elementary school because she wanted to use her influence to help all black children. She exercised her voice to change the school, and eventually Najya grew into a bright and capable honor roll student at a non-selective neighborhood middle school that was better than its test scores would say. However, systemic inequalities were too entrenched, and her daughter wound up failed by the same systems that failed many others, learning less than she expected before choosing to attend a rigorous high school and working hard to catch up.

But here’s another story: A wealthy and influential woman exercised New York City’s generous school choice options to send her child to an out-of-neighborhood school that currently receives more funding than almost any other school in the country and more than 90% of other schools in New York City, boasting funding of $52,349 per student and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio as of the 2024–2025 school year.

She did so because that school exemplified her values, and she persuaded parents around the country to make similar decisions on the strength of her conviction. For years, she experienced a sort of motivated blindness towards the dysfunction of a place that saw children fighting in the lunchroom unsupervised, assigned fake homework and gave fake grades, and ignored her daughter’s needs, giving her the opportunity to brag in public about the value she brought her daughter’s school even as they ignored her in private.

She did the same in middle school, building a close relationship with her daughter’s principal while celebrating her daughter’s place as an honor roll student and dismissing warning signs because some kids struggle with tests. As late as 2024, she spoke about her decision in glowing terms.

It was only when her daughter told her that she never got the education she wanted that she told the truth about what happened, revealing a decade of education horror stories.  [...]

Null Hypothesis Watch

Manhattan Institute: NEW: We visited PS 307, the failing public school that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.

The teachers make an average of over $100,000 a year. The school spends $52,000 per student each year. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1.

We went to another school just down the street that spends less than half of what PS 307 does—yet the academic outcomes are significantly better. Underfunding and racism aren’t causing schools to fail.

Jack: This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.

If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It’s already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k?  [...]

The Two Big Scandals

I circle back to the real larger scandals here, of which there are two.

First, that the schools are getting massive amounts of money, not teaching students or controlling classrooms and outright committing fraud, and no one seems to care:

Peachy Keenan: Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don’t assign homework, don’t grade tests, don’t respond to parents emails or phone calls, don’t supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don’t know or care if their students can read or do grade level math, and give them As on their report cards when they are actually doing F level work?

Why did Nikole Hannah Jones bury this explosive lede?

Why isn’t she writing emergency front page @nytimes stories about this shocking, incredible, abject citywide failure that costs people who pay taxes over $50K per student per year?

Why isn’t she holding emergency all-hands on deck meetings with @NYCMayor to shut this down, rescue these kids, fire everyone involved?

We all know why. But no one at the Times will say a word. LOL.

The second is the one that no one seems to notice.

Which is that despite Najya getting very little education and no homework for eight years, in which she lacked basic math concepts and presumably had similar gaps in other subjects, by the end of ninth grade she was at a competitive school earning As and Bs and doing fine.

Which is great for Najya. I love a happy ending. None of this is on her in any way, and she fought hard to go to a good school and then to catch up. But, again, what is the point of elementary and middle school, if one year of concentrated effort can fix that?

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: Wayne Lawrence/NY Times

[ed. See also: American students are getting dumber (SB).]